The Irascible Professor
SMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"The
task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate
deserts."....
....C.S. Lewis.

Commentary of the Day -
November 10, 2007: Some Will Be Left Behind.
Guest commentary by Poor Elijah (Peter Berger).

If the road to
hell is paved with good intentions, the street signs that mark the way
are all ironic slogans. Herbert Hoover, for example, meant well
when he reassured the nation that prosperity was just around the corner.
Neville Chamberlain had the world's best interests at heart when he
promised peace in our time. They were both decent men, they were
both wrong, and they've paid for their misjudgments by becoming punch
lines in the margins of twentieth century history.

Today schools
are laboring under a twenty-first century punch line slogan of their
own, No Child Left Behind. While President Bush
characteristically gets the prize for being most stubborn in defense of
his bankrupt education law, it's only fair to remember that it isn't
just his law. It's a federal law, and it didn’t get to be one
without the support of notables on both sides of the political aisle.

It's also only
fair to concede that most of NCLB's sponsors were moved by good
intentions. Yes, conservatives hoped it would foster more school
choice, and liberals expected it would channel more federal money into
education. But apart from their particular partisan concerns, both
sides were responding to the inescapable reality that too many American
students are learning too little, and that our national academic decline
will inevitably beget a decline in both our standard of living and our
standing in the world.

It doesn't take
a jeweler's eye to find the flaws that led to our undoing. Since
the 1970s we've stripped our schools of discipline and academic content
in the name of self-esteem and social development. While education
experts undermined classrooms with unsound theories and bogus bandwagon
miracles, society at large welcomed an age where hard work and
perseverance are scorned and self-absorption basks in the spotlight.
A spirit of entitlement plagues our land and our schools. We
guarantee success and outlaw failure. Our new higher standards are
empty rhetoric, our mission statements are platitudes, and our endeavors
are fatally compromised.

Into this
debacle rode No Child Left Behind. And into the gaping
national breech the law placed teachers like me.

No Child Left
Behind. That's quite a promise to put in someone else's mouth.
Especially when the promise is a federal law specifically requiring that
every American child be proficient in reading and math by 2014.
That's every American child. Or else.

Or else what?

Imagine a
federal law requiring doctors to make all Americans healthy.

Not that
schools are doing everything right. They definitely aren't.
The trouble is NCLB simply replaced one set of bankrupt follies
with another. That’s the way public education works. We
ricochet between extremes.

No Child
Left Behind is right that we need an honest reckoning of where
American students stand academically and how they got there. We
need to acknowledge the causal role three decades of comfy,
content-light, "student centered" education theories have played in the
disaster. Unfortunately, NCLB's mandates compel schools to
divert substantial resources, money, and time from teaching to testing.
Those tests have taught us less about student achievement than they have
about the unreliability of modern testing itself.

According to a
senior RAND analyst, NCLB's assessment regime doesn't identify
"good schools" and "bad schools," just "lucky and unlucky schools."
A Brookings Institution study found that "fifty to eighty percent of the
improvement in a school’s average test scores from one year to the next
was temporary" and "caused by fluctuations that had nothing to do with
long-term changes in learning or productivity." Congress's General
Accountability Office described data "comparisons between states" as
"meaningless."

A September
2007 Thomas B. Fordham Institute report found NCLB's assessment
system "slipshod" and characterized by "standards that are discrepant
state to state, subject to subject, and grade to grade." For
example, third graders scoring at the sixth percentile on Colorado's
state reading test are rated proficient. In South Carolina the
third grade proficiency cut-off is the sixtieth percentile.

Significant
discrepancies exist within individual states as well. In most
states "eighth grade tests are sharply harder to pass" than "those in
earlier grades." Compared to a national norm, Vermont third
graders scoring at the thirty-third percentile are counted proficient in
reading. Vermont eighth graders have to score at the forty-eighth
percentile to qualify for the same proficiency rating. This
floating standard is equivalent to calling an eighty an A in
third grade and a B in eighth grade, and then wondering why fewer
eighth graders are getting A's.

As Congress
wrangles over renewing NCLB, legislators are tinkering with its
most problematic provisions. Some propose postponing the 2014
universal proficiency deadline, as if postponement will somehow make
universal proficiency less impossible. In his search for allies
among the critics who've panned the law as too narrow in its focus,
President Bush has begun talking about "every child" performing "at
grade level, or above," as if a law that couldn't bring every child up
to grade level will somehow now bring them all that high and higher.

No federal law
will solve our problem. First, unlike national defense, the
federal government owns no special expertise in public education.
All it brings is another level of bureaucracy and a greater distance
from classroom realities. Second, the root of our troubles lies in
a generation of failed education reforms and our endemic national
self-indulgence.

But if we do
renew the law, as we most likely will, let's at least change the name to
"Some Will Be Left Behind." For starters, it's the truth.
Some children, and adults, simply can't, or won't, perform academically.
It's absurd and futile to hold schools accountable for abilities,
initiative, or supportive home lives that some students don't have.
Proposed changes to NCLB, including a requirement that states
prepare eighty percent of their graduates for college, continue to
ignore the reality that eighty percent of Americans will be prepared for
college only if we water down what college needs to be.

Renaming the
law would deliver a valuable reminder. No one will be willing to
sweat if success is guaranteed without it. It's in our national
interest to care for the infirm and to ensure for all Americans,
regardless of race or class, the opportunity to improve through diligent
effort. School can help provide that opportunity. We need to
teach our students that while effort doesn't guarantee success, indolent
complacency almost always leads to failure. We need to warn them
that without hard work and responsibility, they will be left behind.